Truyện tiếng Anh Virgin New Adventures 14 Lucifer Rising # Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
‘If I’d wanted to spend the rest of my life hoofing it around grimy
spaceships for no good reason I’d have stayed in Spacefleet.’
Ace is back. And she is not in a good mood. Bernice has asked the Doctor to bring the TARDIS to the planet Lucifer, site of a scientific expedition. It’s history to her: the exploration of alien artefacts on Lucifer came to an abrupt halt three centuries before she was born, and she’s always wondered why.
Uncovering the answer involves the Doctor, Bernice and Ace in sabotage, murder, and the resurrection of eons-old alien powers.
Are there Angels on Lucifer? And what does it all have to do with Ace? Full-length, original novels based on the longest-running science fiction television series of all time, the BBC’s Doctor Who. the New Adventures take the TARDIS into previously unexplored realms of space and time.
Andy Lane lives in London. In spite of being a physics graduate he has
written articles for just about every British SF magazine, including the Doctor Who magazine.
Jim Mortimore lives in Bristol. When he isn’t writing he’s winning awards for
his computer graphics or playing keyboards for techno group SLS.
Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore First published in 1993 by Doctor Who Books an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd 332 Ladbroke Grove London W10 5AH Copyright © Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane 1993 ‘Doctor Who’ series copyright © British Broadcasting Corporation 1963, 1993 Cover illustration by Jim Mortimore Illustrated by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood Phototypeset by Intype, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks
ISBN 0 42620 338 7 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To My Family and Other Animals: Jon and Alison, Andrew D, Mark, Shauni, Miles, Steve and June
(encouragement, support and psychoanalysis) Martin and Tanya (ta for the tent, rave on)
Dave, Rodders and the BSFR mob (insanity) Andy and Helen (niceness and free records)
Andrew (solipsism and biscuits) Mum and Dad (cash when it really mattered)
Kathy (vintage ’63 snuggles) Tricia (she’s mad, she’s bad, she’s on the cover – twice) and
Ben JM
DEDICATED TO THE DUMBLECON CREW – JUSTIN , CRAIG , ANDREW , GARY , DAVID , THE TWO PETERS , GREEN GILBERT , BILLIBUB AND
WILLIE THE WINE BOX .
AJL
Contents
1
7
11
23
31
35
45
59
73
87
91 101
115
129
143
153
167
Part Four: Demogorgon 183
187
197
207
219
Part Five: Lucifer Rising 229
233
245
253
265
PROLOGUE FALLING FROM GRACE
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee;
Wordsworth – Toussaint, the most unhappy man Yonder in the north there is singing on the lake. Cloud maidens dance on the shore. There we take our being.
Yonder in the north cloud beings rise. They ascend unto cloud blossoms. There we take our being.
Yonder in the north rain stands over the land. . . Yonder in the north stands forth at twilight the arc of a rainbow. There we have our being.
Tewa Pueblo Chant
Someone had once told Paula Engado that it wasn’t the fall that killed you, it was the sudden stop when you hit the ground. At the time she’d found it funny.
She wasn’t laughing now. Tumbling uncontrollably through an atmosphere that was growing hotter and denser by the minute, her sense of humour seemed to have evaporated along with her starsuit’s external sensors.
Tiny globules of sweat hung in front of Paula’s eyes. She batted them aside with a twitch of her head. The stench of her own body was almost overwhelm- ing, and she had to concentrate hard in order to read the suit’s instruments. It was no use. Every single read-out, every single diagnostic, had crashed. Using the chin switches, she tried to pull some kind of exterior view from the infected software, but she might just as well have tried to walk back up to Belial. More angry than scared, she operated a manual control to peel back the first few layers of filters from the helmet visor, and finally, managed to get a dim view of the storm through which she was falling: an atmospheric dis- turbance bigger than the distant Earth. The deep rumble of colliding pressure fronts filled her ears; flickering discharges of lightning illuminated the dead faces of the digital read-outs inside her helmet – further evidence, if it were needed, of the giant planet Lucifer’s vast and complex meteorology.
Lucifer – the fallen Angel. How apt. Ignoring the safety regulations governing spacewalk protocol, Paula peeled back another layer of gold shielding from her visor. More shapes and colours leaped into focus. Through her reflection, she saw coils of gas rush past her helmet, churning sickeningly around each other before vanishing into the tow- ering atmosphere above.
The starsuit suddenly seemed to be closing in on her. The miracle of modern science, which until now had surrounded and nurtured her, was becoming a claustrophobic prison in which the smell of plastic, sweat and burnt insulation was almost overwhelming.
Paula felt panic rise within her. She didn’t want to die alone, thousands of kilometres from the nearest human being, beyond the reach of even her fa- ther’s emotionless touch. She was facing her fear, but, unlike the Tewa Ameri- can Indians of her grandfather’s stories, it was defeating her. Desperately, she chinned the switch that should have dispensed a dose of tranquillizing drugs, but the autodoc software had crashed along with the main systems.
She closed her eyes and clutched at the solace of a remembered embrace, a stolen kiss. Then with a mighty effort she thrust the memory away. It was all behind her now.
The thought acted like a sudden blast of cold air: everything seemed to pull back into focus from the grainy world of terror. She was still shivering uncontrollably, although the temperature was hotter than comfortable. Blink- ing sweat out of her eyes, she looked out through the barely shielded helmet visor. Something was happening. If she peered hard she could still make out the multicoloured clouds and the thousand kilometre wide flashes of sheet lightning, but her visor seemed to be misting over. Everything outside was becoming blurred and confused. The colours were running together like a child’s painting.
It was only when she felt the sudden warmth on her cheek that Paula knew she was crying, and with that realization all self-control fled. She beat sense- lessly upon the inside of her suit until her clenched fists were raw and bleed- ing, only to feel the joints in the sleeves begin to give way. The helmet visor cracked as the temperature rose sharply. Alien gases burst into the suit, blis- tering her skin and scorching her lungs. She clenched her eyes shut with pain, cutting off her last clear view of the dead internal systems displays.
As she died, Paula’s mind fixed upon an odd trinket of philosophy that her long-dead grandfather had once quoted to her, the last thing she would ever consciously remember – a final, useless bead of comfort to ward off the in- evitable.
Only in death do we find peace. Only from death do we learn of life.
She choked the words aloud as a final goodbye; hurled them defiantly into the void; screamed them above the screech of rending metal, until Lucifer tore the breath from her lungs, the blood from the veins and the life from her body.
She died. And the Angels came.
PART ONE ASTARTE
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning?
Isaiah, chapter 14, verse 12
Silence.
The Adjudicator dimmed the worklight over Miles Engado’s desk and studied
the stacks of small crystalline blocks before him, piled up in towers like the cities
back on Earth, ripe with false promise.
He sighed. So many questions; so few answers. Paula Engado’s death. The
antagonism of the staff. The unexplained arrival of this mysterious scientist with
his uncoordinated wardrobe and his uncoordinated friends. The Angels. Where
to start?
The Adjudicator let his fingers hover delicately over the opaque crystal blocks.
He lifted one and fed it into the reader.
Although his movements appeared leisurely and unstudied, there was nothing
random about them. The Adjudicator never did anything at random. Everything
had a reason.To find it, it was only necessary to look in the right place.
Chapter One
<LOAD FILE A153/X/23/2/2154> <SETUP> <RUN 35660> ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ said Miles Engado, turning away from the group assembled amongst the cleared chairs and tables of the Belial Base re- fectory. ‘Section Leaders to meet me in Conference Room One in ten minutes,’ he added, and walked away.
<STOP> <SET LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS = ON> <SET SYNTAX = FULL> <SET CONTEXT = FULL> <SET MOTIVATIONAL ANALYSIS = ON> <SET SUBROUTINES FREUD, JUNG, ADLER, SKINNER> <RERUN 35660> ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ said Miles Engado, his voice catching slightly as he turned away from the simularity projector in the centre of the room. The rest of the small group assembled amongst the cleared chairs and tables of the Belial Base refectory stood transfixed by the replayed sight of Paula Engado’s last moments, recorded by a remote drone which had followed her down into Lucifer’s poisonous atmosphere. The drone had been too light and too slow to do anything but observe, transmit and finally be destroyed itself. As the tumbling figure grew a glowing tail of debris, then broke up into a shower of sparks, only Piper O’Rourke thought to put her hand on Miles Engado’s shoulder. He patted it absently. In the glare of his daughter’s death, the tears which silently explored the creases and folds of his face glistened like comets.
‘Section Leaders to meet me in the Conference Room in ten minutes,’ he murmured, and walked away. Piper let her hand fall as her eyes lingered on Miles’s back. The door to the refectory clunked into place behind him. Glances were exchanged all around the room.
<STOP> <SET POINT-OF-VIEW = PIPER O’ROURKE> <SET STYLE = 20> <SET INTERPOLATION = ON>
<OPTIONS: (A) LIST ALL EMOTIONAL RESPONSES.
(B) PRIORITIZE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES>
<B> <SORTING. . . PRIORITIZE AND LIST MOST PROBABLE RESPONSE> <OK> <RERUN 35660.1> ‘Section Leaders to meet me in the Conference Room in ten minutes,’ Miles added sharply, before shrugging off the woman’s comforting touch and leaving the refectory. Piper let her hand fall as her eyes lingered on the tall, balding figure in the severely tailored turquoise tunic. He was a proud man, one who perhaps over valued dignity and restraint, but essentially a good man. Too good for her, perhaps.
Piper glanced around at the other members of the team who had turned out to mourn Paula and show support for her father. Practically the whole research staff was crammed into the circular refectory, one of the few human-built rooms on the Base capable of holding that many people. The only absentees were those on duty down on Moloch, together with Federique Moshe-Rabaan and the three newcomers.
Of the remaining twenty-five people, none were speaking, but then words were unnecessary. Everyone had their own way of coping with this, the Project’s first death since its inception five years ago.
After watching one or two of her own support technicians begin to move the chairs and tables half-heartedly back into position for the evening meal, Piper wandered listlessly over to one of the windows which encircled the re- fectory. The windows had been a concession won by Christine LaFayette from Earth Government. Piper had sometimes wondered whether it had been the financial investment of Christine’s mother in the Project which had spoken louder than her words. Whatever the reason, the site for the social centre of the Base was as near perfect as it was possible to get. Positioned atop the Base’s central dome, the refectory commanded a perfect view both of the air- less dark side of the moon and of the edge of Lucifer, the huge planet it orbited around. Lucifer’s lurid atmospheric glow circled the horizon in a ring broken only by the irregular towers of the mountain ranges, the rock shaped by an abrasive atmosphere long since torn away. The Ring of Lucifer, as it had be- come known, cast a flat scarlet glare across the outlying regions of the base, and threw everyone’s shadow towards the centre of the room. One or two of the staff considered the sight somewhat morbid, but Christine had insisted that the Base personnel needed to be able to look out on a real landscape once in a while, not a simularity of one generated by a neural net.
That was fine in theory but, gazing over the fantastic and disturbing land- scape of Belial, Piper came close to admitting she would have preferred the simularity.
Ah, but you couldn’t see reflections in a simularity, could you? You couldn’t
watch everyone in the room without being watched yourself.Over on the far side of the refectory, Sam Russell, a middle-aged engineer in a padded foil suit, reached out to hold his wife Cheryl’s hand as she sobbed inconsolably. Alex Bannen sneered as he walked past them, his ornate robes giving him the look of some sweaty Buddha. Only the diminutive, dark-haired Christine LaFayette was actively studying everyone else in the room. But, Piper thought, as the Chief Psychologist responsible for the mental health of the team, that was her job.
Piper turned away. She felt distanced from their grief: cold and unreach- able. She’d left Earth to escape a world disintegrating into a crazy mess of restrictions, paranoia and self-destruction. For a while, she had really thought she’d made it.
The simularity of Lucifer’s turbulent cloud patterns flickered off just as Paula’s last burning fragments, having used up the scant supply of oxygen from her suit, sputtered and died.
Piper jerked herself out of her reverie with an effort. The nightmare view of Lucifer was replaced by a standard picture – a translucent view of Belial Base itself, with the main corridors and chambers shining pinkly inside it like the organs of some gelatinous alien life form. Peo- ple began to move, drifting almost aimlessly around the refectory as if unsure what to do now the service was over.
Piper sighed. Her gaze travelled from the reflection of the room to her own image. Critically, she began to tug at the puffy sleeves and complicated thongs of her tunic, but her practised grooming motions died away as her gaze caught first upon the sapphire that had been surgically implanted on her left ring finger, and then on the blue veins which snaked across the backs of both hands. She straightened and did something which she usually avoided – looked at her face. Getting old was a funny thing. Paula never made it past her eighteenth birthday, but Piper would probably hit a hundred and ten before senility started to creep in. More, if she was careful. She certainly didn’t intend to waste her life. She had plans. For after Eden.
Piper caught a cold glint in her reflection’s eye. Age is making you hard, she thought. You’ve got too many years behind you, too many memories and regrets clogging up your mind. They’re young. Death doesn’t touch them the way it touches you. It’s not breathing down their necks yet.
She pulled her gaze away from the familiar stranger that was her reflection and looked over to where Alex Bannen and Christine LaFayette were continu- ing an argument which had already flourished for years and seemed likely to go on forever.
‘Look, it’s obvious, right? All you’ve got to do is ask your mother for more financial support – that way the Eden Project gets a new lease of life and maybe we all end up winners.’
‘I’ve told you before, Alex. Mother and I don’t talk. Ever.’ The faintest of French accents gently smoothed her vowels into soft shapes. ‘Even though she bought you a place on the staff?’ Christine’s voice became icy cold. ‘Are you questioning my professional ability? Some people might think that merits a psychological checkup, and that could get you sent back to Earth.’
Bannen turned away in sudden embarrassment. Normally the Technical Services Supervisor was too fat, too loud, and just too much altogether. Piper had no time for him or his affectation of importance, so much larger in his own mind than in anyone else’s when the mission began, and running dan- gerously out of control now. But then, sometimes, almost for no reason, the scientist would become like this: embarrassed, lonely, lacking in any of the social graces. At times like these Piper was tempted to feel sorry for him, but Bannen himself stifled any overtures of friendship. Piper had learned a long time ago that he couldn’t handle them, and had stopped worrying about him.
Now she simply found him irritating.
‘You heard what Miles said,’ she snapped, her harshness a deliberate at- tempt to shock them out of their argument. ‘Alex, Christine. Let’s go. The man’s going to want answers and he’s going to want them soon.’
Standing petulantly by the food dispenser, which of late had developed a tendency to drift around the refectory in search of customers, Bannen spoke. ‘And how the hell are we supposed to do that without properly financed –’
Piper sighed. ‘Alex, life’s too short to listen to your whining.’ Christine rubbed her eyes tiredly. ‘I’ll go along with that.’ Bannen’s face fell. ‘Hey, look. We’ve all got our own ways of dealing with the situation, right?’ ‘Yeah, well, just show a little common sense in what you say, Alex, or we might suddenly find Earth pulling the rug out from underneath us,’ Piper pointed out. ‘If that happens, we’re all on a long fall to nowhere.’
‘And Paula thought we were so close,’ Christine murmured. ‘So close.’ Bannen spread his hands placatingly. ‘Look. We’re all fighting over the same pot of gold.’ He turned to Piper and smiled in unconvincing friendship.
‘Perhaps you can make her see reason. If we can’t get more funding from somewhere, then the obvious thing to do is switch resources from LaFayette’s area to mine. It’s the only sensible thing to do. I mean, it’s been five years and we’re still not sure the Angels even know we exist!’
Christine sighed. ‘I just don’t want to argue with you any more, Alex.’
‘This is neither the time nor place for this discussion,’ Piper said. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you both show a little respect?’ Bannen could not resist trying to get the last word. ‘I’ll bring it up at the meeting,’ he said, ‘and if Engado can’t see the way ahead, I’m sure Moshe-
Rabaan and the Energy Police can make him see the error of his ways. Earth Central can’t afford to keep pumping money into the project for no return.’ His face darkened. ‘Nobody said we had jobs for life.’
‘Great.’ Piper breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Now that we’ve all got that off our chests, let’s stop behaving like juvenile simularities and give Miles the support he needs.’
Piper turned on her heel and began to walk towards the exit. After a sym- pathetic look at Bannen, Christine turned to follow. As the two women left the gallery, Bannen’s face twisted into an irritated snarl. He smashed a fist into the simularity of the Base and gained absolutely no satisfaction at all when his arm passed harmlessly through the field.
<RUN ON 20> The Conference Room was a small, enclosed space with neutral decoration and no windows to distract from its most important function: the exchange of information. Piper took her seat opposite Miles Engado thinking, as usual, how bare and characterless the room was. It was the one location on the Base where she felt truly uncomfortable. For a moment, as she sat, Miles caught her eye. Just for a moment. It was an exchange none of the others noticed, but that didn’t surprise Piper in the least.
Miles seemed ready to speak. The room fell silent. ‘The first thing I would like to say is – thank you for all your support. From both of us. As you know, Paula was very dear to me, the more so after her mother’s – death, and I, I would very much like to express –’ Miles’ words seemed to jam in his throat, ‘my great – sorrow. . . ’
Christine’s eyes widened in concern. ‘I move that this meeting be adjourned for twenty-four hours.’ Bannen spoke up. ‘I object. If you’ll forgive me, Coordinator. I know this is a trying time for you, but we have to find an explanation for the suit fail- ure. We have a five person first contact team at the other end of the Bridge. Those people need our support. We can’t risk any malfunction being repeated. The men and women on Moloch rely on us and their work is of paramount importance to the mission. We can’t let them down.’
Piper felt like hitting the man. Bannen cared little for the safety of the mission, and not at all about Miles Engado’s feelings. All he wanted was more money for his research, and that meant keeping the meeting going despite Christine’s attempts to curtail it.
‘Alex, Christine.’ Miles’s voice was completely under control. ‘Our initial responsibility is to the mission. However, there is an agenda for this meeting, and I think we should adhere to it. We will discuss possible causes of my daughter’s death, accidental or otherwise, under the heading of “Any Other Business”.’
Piper favoured Miles with a direct stare. She wished she could reach out and help this proud man. Ease his pain. Miles was precise and intelligent, and rarely showed any of his feelings. Although Christine, not she, was the psychologist, Piper could still tell how close to cracking Miles Engado was. It provoked a feeling within her that she thought had died with her husband.
‘So,’ the Coordinator continued, if there are no objections, I shall declare this meeting open. The minutes of the meeting will be abstracted from the neural network simularity records at a later date.’ He glanced up at a tiny drone, no bigger than a twisted loop of silver tape, bobbing silently in the corner of the room.
‘Now,’ he continued, stroking the surface of the table before him, ‘the first item on the agenda is the exploration of the aboriginal areas both here on Be- lial and down the Bridge on Moloch.’ As his fingers moved, images appeared in bright primary colours, floating above the surface of the table. ‘Piper, since this is your area, perhaps you would care to begin.’ ‘No sweat.’ Piper’s fingers caressed the touch-sensitive surface of the table. Pictures appeared in time with her movements: a real-time simularity of the huge gas giant Lucifer with its string of attendant moons – Astarte, Belial, Moloch and Demogorgon.
‘There hasn’t been a lot of progress since the last Team Leaders’ meeting.’ The simularity suddenly expanded to isolate a section of Lucifer’s outer atmosphere. Above it the two moons, Belial and Moloch, swung in geosyn- chronous orbit, one above the other, linked by the glittering neon thread of the Bridge. To Piper they resembled nothing so much as a dumbbell with unequal weights slowly tumbling through the void.
‘Exploration of the chambers placed throughout the two moons, and of the Bridge which connects them, has so far been proceeding slowly and without much success,’ she continued. ‘Apart from the operations of the Bridge it- self, which Tiw Heimdall worked out two years ago, the functions of most of the other sites within the moon system remain unclear. Despite everyone’s unstinting efforts, we still know nothing more about the aliens who built the complex than we did when we arrived. We don’t even know if the Angels built it, or whether we’re looking for a race who have since moved on. Sure we’ve found artefacts, hundreds of them. Alex’s staff are busy cataloguing them even as we speak. But as to what they are,’ Piper shrugged, ‘well, even the neural net can’t seem to help us. Take this for example.’ She pulled something from a receptacle and held it up for general viewing. ‘Jesus found this in the deadspace this morning. Is it a pen, a fork or a work of art? Analysis tells us it’s made of high-grade tensile steel, but. . . ’ Piper bent and folded the device easily, like cloth. ‘You see?’ She passed the device to Christine. ‘Perhaps the sociologists can make something of it. I can’t.’
Christine took the object and examined it curiously, unfolding and folding it again several times. ‘These things never cease to fascinate me,’ she said. ‘Their expertise in memory metals was certainly phenomenal. It must have led to a whole new way of thinking: a looser, more unstructured, more abstract philosophy.’ Alex Bannen snorted. ‘Psychobabble,’ he said, smiling as Christine flinched.
Piper’s fingers made small, circular motions on the table, and the picture zoomed in again to show the two moons in more detail, locked into syn- chronous orbit. Belial Base, on the upper moon, was marked as a blue nest of tunnels on the side furthest from Lucifer. From it, the single orange tunnel known colloquially as the Pit passed completely through the entire moon, ter- minating in a small orange blob on the other side. From there, an orange line joined it to Moloch, the lower moon. Apart from a green outline, Moloch’s interior was coloured completely in orange. The twin moons, one solid, one hollow, continued their orbit, linked along an axis that, if extended, would join the centres of both moons to that of Lucifer itself.
Another brush of the fingers. New tunnels appeared, marked in red. ‘In the last two weeks we’ve opened up a new system of galleries. Prelimi- nary geodating places them at between five hundred and a thousand million years old. There’s no atmosphere in there yet, so Cheryl and Sam Russell are trying to seal them and get an oxygen generator set up.’ She paused. ‘Strange that they’d fill the whole interior of Moloch with air and vegetation and a few hundred tunnels here on Belial with nothing but machinery.’ She shook her head, dismissing the thought as one more insoluble mystery. ‘And that’s it. The rest you know.’
‘Busy little critters, weren’t they?’ offered Bannen. ‘Digging their tunnels and building their machines while our remote ancestors were still working out how to divide one cell in two.’
‘Not so remote, in your case,’ Christine murmured, just loud enough for Bannen to hear. ‘We’re no closer to finding out how the two moons are kept locked in their geosynchronous orbit,’ Piper continued. ‘I’m no astrophysicist, and I’m sure
Alex will correct me if I’m wrong, but Moloch should be orbiting much faster than Belial, because it’s closer to Lucifer. Somehow it’s being held back.’ ‘By the Bridge?’ Christine said. Bannen smirked at her. ‘We’ve gone over the mechanism with a fine-tooth comb. The equipment that locks each end in place is very sophisticated – bloody weird, in fact – but the Bridge itself is just an extruded monofilament woven into a tubular shaft. Nothing more sophisticated than a basic elevator. At the levels of tension those moons are generating, that Bridge should snap like a piece of old knicker elastic.’
‘What about Moloch’s hollowness?’ Piper asked. ‘Could the unusually low density be, oh, I don’t know, holding it back, or something?’ ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Bannen sneered. ‘Leave the science to me, dear.’ There was a momentary, embarrassed silence as all four of them looked at the simularity in the centre of the table. A small green ring could just be made out, sliding up the Bridge like a doughnut on a string. That would be the Lift containing B Shift, Piper decided, making their way back from Moloch to Belial, and a well-earned rest. As Head of Support Services, it was one of her jobs to organize the shifts around the seemingly random meanderings of the Lift. Sometimes it seemed that any time not taken up with designing, redesigning, streamlining, adjusting and rotating duty rosters for the Project staff was spent generating simularities of the Lift and trying to work out if there was any systematic basis for its movements, or whether it just shifted between Belial and Moloch on a whim and a prayer. So far only Tiw Heimdall seemed to have the faintest idea how and why the Bridge worked. The trouble with Tiw was. . . Well, he was just Tiw, and that was that.
As her thoughts gradually drifted back towards reality, Piper became aware that Bannen was still talking. ‘. . . we’re beginning to suspect,’ Bannen was saying, ‘that it’s friction be- tween Moloch and Lucifer’s atmosphere that is slowing it down. We know that the moon is actually orbiting within Lucifer’s atmospheric envelope, and its surface is markedly hotter than Belial’s. Problem is, this raises more ques- tions than it answers. If Moloch were subject to any degree of friction, how- ever slight, over the length of time we are considering here that friction would have eroded the damn thing right away. And there’s still the obvious question to be addressed: both the moons and the Bridge orbit well within Lucifer’s Roche Limit, so why weren’t they reduced to rubble aeons ago?’ Christine looked slightly puzzled. Bannen caught the expression.
‘I know you’re not an astronomer, Christine, but by all that’s sensible, do your homework,’ he snapped. ‘No moon can exist within a certain distance of its parent planet without breaking apart due to gravitational stress. Moloch does. The implication is that the builders of these installations, whoever or whatever they were, physically moved Moloch to where they wanted it and then protected it for millennia from a basic law of nature.’
There was a longer silence as the four of them took in the significance of Bannen’s remark. Piper watched Christine shrink back in her seat. ‘And we’re trespassing on their territory,’ Piper said finally. ‘Borrowing their bases for our own purposes. What happens if they come back?’ ‘We apologize,’ said Bannen in a dry monotone.
‘Thank you,’ said Miles Engado, when it became clear that Piper had fin- ished her report. She tried to catch his eye, but he either didn’t see or wasn’t going to respond. The Coordinator presented an impression of outward com- placency. Piper wondered what emotions lay in wait beneath his calm exterior.
‘Christine,’ he continued, ‘perhaps you could bring us up to speed on the next agenda item: the attempt to communicate with the Angels.’ The French psychologist drew a breath. ‘Well, that’s not a problem. I can sum it up in two words: total failure.’ ‘Would you care to expand on that?’ ‘There’s not a lot to expand on. The original one-year programme of com- munications packages backed up with translation software and psychological interpretation washed out because the Angels shy away from any form of me- chanical device.’ Anticipating the next question, she added, ‘We still have no idea why. As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t many options left to explore. Our best idea for the past few months was to send Paula down in a shielded starpod to try and raise some sort of interest from the Angels. But for reasons I can’t pretend to understand, she jumped the gun and tried to make a go of it in an ordinary starsuit, with predictable results.’
She saw the pain in Miles’s eyes, and flinched. ‘Sorry Miles, clumsy of me.’ ‘Understood,’ said the Coordinator, and gestured for her to continue. ‘Progress on the artificial ecology programme can best be detailed by Alex and his pet scientist,’ Christine said, waving dismissively at Bannen. ‘After all, it’s their baby.’ She sighed. ‘Basically, the bottom line is this: after five years, we still have no solid evidence that the Angels even know we’re here.’
Piper grinned. ‘I’ll hang up an ideas box.’ ‘I’ve got one straight away,’ Bannen said. ‘Quit messing about and assign more money to the hard sciences.’ Christine leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. She sighed. ‘You think you can accomplish more with spanners and scalpels than I can with the sensible application of proven psychological theory?’
‘Sounds more like you need the application of a large dose of common sense to me,’ Bannen snapped. ‘If you can’t get the Angels to talk to you then I’ll breed you some that will. I have seventeen domefuls of artificial environment out there whose subroutines need careful adjustment if they’re to be of any use.’
His fingers stabbed the table top, bringing to life a number of small blue dots scattered around the outlying regions of the base. ‘I’ve re-created the planetary atmosphere in these domes. If Christine could overcome her reluc- tance to capture and dissect one of those creatures and provide me with a cell sample, I could be cloning and redeveloping Angel life forms in a controlled ecology before you could say “Jack Daniels”.’ Miles Engado rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘I take it you wish to begin your report now, Alex?’ ‘So far it’s the only one to have yielded any results,’ Bannen snapped. ‘That’s true, Alex,’ said Piper, ‘but we all know that your experiments are long term. You won’t miss any vital information if you don’t seed your precious arks for another six months or a year. Wait until the funds are rotated to your department. Not everything has to be done in seven days, you know.’
Bannen’s fist crashed into the table. The simularity flickered, colours strob- ing across its surface. ‘Every time we have these meetings, I hear the same line of crap,’ he said harshly. ‘Nobody’s got the guts to terminate the unproductive research and channel the money to where it’s needed!’
Miles quelled Bannen with a glance. ‘I asked for a scientific report, not a shouting match. Please try to be more professional in your approach to the meeting. Nothing can be achieved with this attitude.’
Bannen looked sullen. ‘Yeah. Right.’ ‘Please continue then.’ ‘I don’t have anything to add on this subject.’ Miles sighed. ‘Then what about your main function here – the analysis of the potential of this planet as a source of energy?’ ‘You know the answer as well as I do. You’ve seen my analyses. I suspect that all the super-heavy elements of the periodic table are here in abundance.
They must be used to power the Lift and Moloch’s interior sun. But we need the Angels to tell us where, and how, they’re produced and stabilized, and to help us obtain samples. We have to communicate with them.’
Piper looked around. Nobody seemed to want to add anything to Bannen’s comments. Miles took a deep breath. ‘Very well. In that case we will proceed to the last item on the agenda. Any Other Business.’ ‘Objection.’ Bannen spoke the word as if he had been rehearsing it. ‘We haven’t finished discussing the reallocation of funds from Social to Technical.’ ‘Objection overruled,’ said Miles calmly. ‘There will be no reallocation. De- spite the – setbacks – I’m happy with the status quo.’ Bannen’s self-satisfied expression vanished like a burst soap bubble. ‘I’ll take this to Moshe-Rabaan,’ he said, a whine creeping into his voice. ‘She’ll see things my way. She’ll see how you’re all just protecting your own interests.’
‘You do that,’ said Christine, a knowing smile crossing her face. ‘Just be sure she doesn’t think that your area deserves cutting more than mine.’ Miles continued over Bannen’s protestations. ‘Before I close this meeting,’ he announced, ‘I wish to make a statement. Paula’s death has. . . Well, it has hit me hard. Getting through the next few days will not be easy for me. I will need all of you behind me.’ His voice softened, and he met all of their eyes in turn. ‘I would like to thank you all for your help so far. Christine, Alex.’ Was it her imagination, or did his voice soften further, gain warmth? ‘Piper – thank you.’ They all straightened in their seats and murmured embarrassed nothings. Piper was surprised to see even Bannen blush.
‘But,’ and Miles’s voice was harsher now, ‘I’m sure it’s occurred to all of you that there are four possible explanations for Paula’s death. The first is a tech- nical malfunction on the suit itself. The second is carelessness on Paula’s part. The third is some sort of action by the Angels, which implies that they might be more aware of us than we had thought. The fourth is Lucifer itself – an unexpected quirk of the planet or its atmosphere that caught Paula unawares.’
He looked around the table. ‘The matter requires investigation. I have therefore summoned an Adjudicator from Ponten Six.’ He let the resultant uproar run its course for a minute before thumping the table and calling for quiet. The globes of the moons dissolved into a crazy patchwork of multicoloured rhomboids as the simularity projector was disturbed.
‘You have just proved my point,’ he said, as soon as it seemed his voice would be heard. ‘We are all too close to the situation. If it was a technical problem with the suit which resulted in Paula’s death, that falls to you, Piper, since it is the responsibility of Technical Support Services to maintain the suits.’
Piper felt the blood drain from her face. ‘You can’t –’ ‘Let me speak. If it was a personal fault, that’s either down to the Base psychiatrists, and that means you, Christine, or Paula’s family.’ He looked down at the table. ‘And that means me.’ Christine chose not to respond to the potential accusation. Piper couldn’t let the matter drop so easily. ‘Look, we don’t need any Adjudicator to –’ Miles lifted his eyes to stare her down. There was so much anguish in those eyes she found it hard to believe anyone could hold it all in without going mad.
‘If it was the Angels who were responsible, well, that’s down to you as well Christine, for not anticipating the possibility that they might turn against us. And if it was a climatic problem, an electrical storm or turbulence, you, Alex, assured us that Paula would be safe.’
Piper kept silent as the protests rose again. ‘Of course, it’s possible it could be Paula’s. . . ’ Miles’s voice cracked. ‘Paula’s. . . ’ He was unable to finish the sentence. A moment passed in silence.
He stood up. ‘Please understand that I am not trying to assign blame. I’m trying to indicate that we all have something at stake. We need an indepen- dent outsider to investigate the circumstances of Paula’s death, to sift through the facts and decide which explanation is the correct one. An Adjudicator is completely independent.’ The profound silence that filled the room was broken by a bashful cough.
‘Excuse me,’ said a quiet voice, ‘but you seem to have forgotten the fifth possibility.’ Miles Engado turned to look at the man who stood by the door. ‘And what is that?’ he queried. ‘Murder,’ said the Doctor. <STOP> <LOAD CURRENT FILE. SUBJECT: THE DOCTOR> <NO RECORD IN BASE PERSONNEL> <RECHECK PERSONNEL RECORDS. SUBJECT: THE DOCTOR> <CONFIRMED. NO RECORD IN BASE PERSONNEL> <SEARCH FOR FIRST APPEARANCE: THE DOCTOR> <SEARCHING. . . FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE DOCTOR:
FILE A151/X/19/11/2154>
Chapter Two
<LOAD FILE A1511X/19111/2154> <SETUP> <SET STYLE = 75> <SET POINT-OF-VIEW = THE DOCTOR> <COMMAND INCOMPATIBLE WITH CURRENT SYSTEM STATUS> <LIST POINT-OF-VIEW OPTIONS> <INTERPOLATED; ADDITIONAL PERSONNEL ONLY> <SET POINT-OF-VIEW = INTERPOLATED> <RUN 34992> The corridor was triangular in cross section and lined with machinery. The floor was steeply concave, but covered with a mesh grille. Doorways led off it, each sealed with a large slab of metal. The air was musty, as if some- thing malevolent had crawled in there a million years ago and given birth to shadows and silence and dust.
And then, perhaps for the first time in centuries, a faint echo ran through the corridor; a sound like distant drums, or perhaps a thunderstorm far away across a black sea. The air in the corridor swung apart like a grimy curtain to reveal a large blue box with a flashing light on top. Momentarily the thunder crashed overhead, as if something infinitely heavy had come to rest.
The moment the doors of the blue box opened, and a small, rather ex- uberant gentleman in a gaudy pullover, tartan trousers and brown corduroy jacket emerged, the atmosphere changed completely. Perhaps it was the white Panama hat perched upon his head like a nesting bird; perhaps the fact that beneath its brim, like two large, round eggs, his eyes were bright and full of joyful intelligence. Whatever it was, the sum of all the individual details added up to a personality shining with the conviction that, whatever the situ- ation, whatever the galaxy, it could be grasped as firmly and immediately as the crooked handle of his umbrella.
Twirling the umbrella like an old-fashioned propeller, the gentleman looked around, wide eyed, as if he couldn’t believe his luck in landing exactly where he had. A corridor! Yes, but what sort of corridor? What was it a corridor in? Where did it lead? And what adventures were lying in wait for him at either end?
He walked jauntily over to the nearest door and pushed at it. Nothing happened. He looked around the frame for buttons or handles but there were none. He tapped it a few times with the handle of his umbrella. Still nothing. He tried to force his fingers into the gap around the frame, then suddenly withdrew them when he realized what might happen to them if the door suddenly opened. He tried humming a few bars of ‘Chatanooga Choo-Choo’ at it, but the door wasn’t impressed. He sighed, and turned to survey the corridor. It glowed with possibilities. Should he go left? Or right? Perhaps he should try various combinations of the two?
Before he could even start to think about his next move, he discovered something very interesting. The door was humming back at him. He bent to listen. It wasn’t humming anything recognizable – more a kind of monotonous, low-pitched vibration in the key of E flat minor with a sustained fifth than anything else – but it was recognizably a hum. And what did that tell him? The hum from a piece of heavy machinery, perhaps? A generator, maybe? Hmm.
E flat minor was his favourite key. A sustained fifth note was icing on the cake. The gentleman considered. Maybe the key to the door was a musical one.
Before he could wrestle the thought to the ground and force it to submit, somebody else left the large blue box – a young woman who wore a badge- loaded jacket over body armour of an unidentifiable material and lycra leg- gings tucked into military-style boots, and whose hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail.
‘Incredible,’ the girl said scornfully. ‘With the entire universe to choose from, he finds another scungy corridor!’ The man turned. ‘Is it deliberate?’ she continued. ‘Do you have some sort of Time Lord sensor in the TARDIS which automatically seeks out cold and dirty corridors to land in, Professor?’
‘Ace!’ the gentleman said, with a subtly hurt burr in his voice. ‘I had hoped that your little holiday might have cured your innate cynicism. I see I was wrong.’